Arggh, MS account/Minecraft, family accounts, nuked profile?

[Mr Whippy]

My son has been complaining a bit about skins for Minecraft and till now I just ran my own XBL account (set up just for Minecraft), logged in via Modrinth, and used mods for changing the names so we can all play on a LAN with our names on a server.

Today I thought I'd try the MS family setup, setup a random email and bought a voucher for Minecraft.

Added it to the new MS account. Job jobbed.

Trying to login to the account in Modrinth, all sorts of popups about a passkey. Ignored that seemingly, I think I pressed escape then restarted Modrinth. Seemed to work via Modrinth without it when reloaded, but the skin bit still wasn't working and so I went via the proper Minecraft launcher where you can properly edit your skin etc.

Adding login details to the official launcher. Would you like to use this profile for everything screen... NO option to not, just 'next' button, tried ESC, no joy. Basically assumed I could click next and then choose things.

Nope.


Next has now seemingly baked that MS email and profile to the local account. I can't remove it.

Looking online it looks like I can't unlock this account because it's a child account. So whereas on a normal local account with an MS account present you can just remove it, I can't do that here.


Am I going to have to nuke this *local* account from orbit, and re-create it and then try the Minecraft login again?

Does anyone know if the admin account can unlock this garbage?

Does anyone know if I turn off MS accounts in gpedit (local policy), it'll stop me being able to use MS accounts for stuff like Minecraft?

All I wanted was some control over Minecraft, not the whole profile!



Had someone at some point said that this family account stuff basically nuked your local machine and turned it into a pseudo MS domain account I'd have said no thanks, and just set up an entirely new burner account... but it seems it's more trouble than it's worth!


Also I'm still baffled what the original start-up of Minecraft was talking about. It brought up a QR code and passkey and said I needed a camera on the device where I wanted to store the passkey?!
It's Minecraft. It have an email and password. That'll do thanks. But seemingly no option to 'no thanks'

Why do they make everything so complicated and stupid?

[ATG]

I'm fairly new to Xbox and it's family settings stuff and I have to say it is a monumental pain in the arse. It is badly designed. It is not clear how it is intended to work. And it is badly implemented so that it frequently fails to work even when used as intended. There are some incredibly stupid things, like asking you to log in on a separate device, yet timing-out the dialogue box on the Xbox before it's physically possible to log in on that other device. And there are two phone apps for parental controls with partially overlapping features, neither individually providing the full set of features, and one of which persistently fails to track Xbox usage accurately. Frankly it's an absolute st show.

[Mr Whippy]

I’ve quite copy created a new login and installed Minecraft launcher and this time it’s not self imposed much on me at all.

I initially turned off allowing MS accounts in group policy, and then also ms accounts and logging into them, to try ‘push’ the old account out of the MS account but no joy.

Maybe that helped with the fresh offline user account/profile? (Despite it still letting me login to the NS account for windows store and Minecraft, but it didn’t try offer to use them outside of those scopes)



In any case it’s very worrying. I often try login to things to do something, I’ve got several MS accounts for things, so it’s worrying I could have done this on my work machine profile and locked myself into a kids profile!


Terrible design.

I highly recommend editing the group policy for this setting for anyone using local accounts.



Wrt parent/child stuff… I did similar for the ‘tv’ gmail account for YouTube, so I could try impose some profiling on the Apple TV YouTube app.
I ended up locking that account into kids mode and my other account which I tried to then pair it to wasn’t good enough without then proving the age for that login… I got around it in the end, somehow, but everything pretty much wants you to live your entire life via that login.

Funnily enough the controls to actually protect kids are lacking.
The systems are basically there to protect their revenue streams from micro-transactions while remaining compliant with ‘protecting kids’ laws.

It seems to be a case of roll your own.


Even my ISPs router has just added tools for controlling access but they’re so rubbish.

Ie, can I ban YouTube except for an hour a day on a certain device? Nope.

But I can block YouTube full stop all the time, or block the internet full stop between certain times, but not a mixture of the two.
Utterly crap. It’s literally two expressions. Time + url ffs.

[ATG]

I get why they did it, but rather than have some access control running on the router, BT have moved it upstream, so instead of logging into a web app served from the router itself, some of its parental control stuff now redirects you to a web app running in the cloud which I have frequently found to be down. So sometimes you cannot enable or disable internet access to a device on your own bleeding LAN because some web app on planet BT is booked. And even when it's working, it's really cumbersome to use because it expires your pin after a few days, so it's username/pwd, then tap through a bunch of links, each time waiting for their crap app pages to render, and eventually you come to a cumbersome config page for your device internet access control. And there's the minor matter of information about each of your connected devices getting pushed upstream by the router, when half the bleeding point of the basic network architecture is to avoid doing that.